Cops forcibly removing someone from a bus for not wearing a face mask, arresting people for failure to socially distance on a crowded subway platform, moving people on if they look like they are socialising in excessive numbers, determining who can attend a public event. This is the new reality of policing the virus. The street-level enforcement of social distancing during the lockdown is just the start. Governments the world over have started rolling out new surveillance schemes and testing regimes in the name of public health. In the timid new world of the present and the brave new world of the future, policing meets health head-on. Medical policing is back. But did it ever stop? For some, the gravity of the new conjuncture finally and decisively inaugurated by the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that revolution is now thinkable. 1 Yet it also means certain features of the class and racial dynamics of the modern capitalist system are set in stark relief. How many healthy people does it take to make an economy run? How many sick people can the health system handle? How many vulnerable migrant workers does it take to run a health system? How many dead friends, family members and lovers will the people tolerate? As pundits, quacks and hacks debate the number of corpses that would make an acceptable blood sacrifice to Capital – aka ‘reopening of the economy’ – the plague is exposing the strategic orientation of the state. In this orientation, the broader police project that has always been central to the fabrication of capitalist order – making and remaking the working class, policing the crises and keeping the great machinery of global accumulation churning – is now manifested most intensely in a series of measures around health and disease, infection and immunity, illness and well-being. For this reason, the term ‘medical police’ is once again a powerful critical resource. The idea of medical police harkens back to the early modern period between the Renaissance and the Great Revolutions at the close the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. This was an extended historical epoch of systems transition when the modern order of things was still being consolidated and older ways of living were still being systemically destroyed. The plebs and the proles and the working class in the making were entangled in both the circuits of capital accumulation and the vestiges of pre-capitalist economies centred on the commons, which went beyond shared property (the commons) and entailed the shared knowledge and communal organisation of social life (practices of commoning). This systematic colonisation of the world was the process that Marx understood as ‘primitive accumulation’, the intervention of the state to transform commons into private property, dispossess and uproot the people from the land, and rebuild social order through the wage relation. During this period of dramatic and violent change, the nature of state power was stark, its oppressiveness plain and its function unambiguous. At the heart of this was the police power. 2 At this time, ‘police’ meant everything that we would now call ‘policy’, including welfare, education, urban planning and, of course, law enforcement. Included in any list of police activities was a set of what we would now designate as matters of ‘public health’ but which went by the name ‘medical police’. Reflecting this orientation, some of the first ‘modern’ police bodies comparable to contemporary law enforcement agencies possessed missions far broader than what we often think of as ‘police’ in the narrower sense. The Royal Irish Constabulary, for example, one of the first such bodies for managing the colonies and a model for the London Metropolitan Police, functioned as a war machine working as medical police. After the failed rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1789, London deepened its control over Ireland with multi-faceted police projects executed by the Constabulary, which, in addition to enforcing the criminal law and repressing rebels, collected agricultural statistics and the decennial census, reported on evictions and loan frauds and inspected weights and measures. They were also quite explicitly designed to be medical police by legislators and administrators. This included identifying prostitutes and other people deemed immoral, loose or disorderly, not least because of the … Continue reading Beware: Medical Police